Food Paranoia

One of the advantages to being married to The Preacher Man is that he gets two weeks off at Christmas.  Although we spend a lot of time together working for the ministry, time to simply be a family is a treat, and we look forward to this little break.

There is only one problem.  He gets bored.  And then he gets weird.

This year, the weirdness has manifested itself in a vendetta against my food.

Case in point:  On Wednesday, I was making bread.  Since the Free Spirit started the Feingold Program, I have had to bake our bread from scratch.  Surely you've seen the gigantic loaves I've been making (if not, see here).  I found two bread makers at garage sales, and while I didn't care for the bullet-proof square loaves they turned out, I was pretty impressed with their dough-making setting, so now I just use them to mix the dough and I bake it in a normal bread pan in the oven.  I try to make two loaves at a time, because, as I'm sure I've discussed in earlier posts, I hate to cook.  So if I'm going to have to do it, I do it in bulk so it can be done less often.  

So on Wednesday I had made two lovely loaves of bread, one in my amazing silicone loaf pan, and the other in the new glass pan I'd just bought that day.  Since it was my first time using the glass pan, I hadn't learned yet how to adjust the baking time, so the loaf baked in that pan didn't get cooked through.

Preacher Man happened to wander into the kitchen.  When he saw the bread, he said, helpfully, "I don't think it's cooked all the way through."

"No, I don't think it is," I agreed.  My intention was to slice the bread and toast it, thereby finishing the cooking and salvaging what could have been a baking disaster.  Apparently, I should have said this out loud, and then perhaps Preacher Man would not have felt the need to rescue the bread.

I left the room for less than two minutes.  When I returned, Preacher Man was gone, and my under cooked loaf had been gutted.

Now, as I keep saying, I hate to cook.  I had just worked long and hard to make that bread.  And now it was mangled.  I stood in the middle of the kitchen making unintelligible sounds for several seconds, and then I sought out Preacher Man.

"Did you," I gasped, barely able to contain myself, "hollow out my bread?"

"Yes, I did."

"Why would you do that?"  I'm pretty sure I was hyperventilating by now.  Preacher Man is either extremely brave or he hasn't learned yet what I look like when I'm about to strangle him.

"It wasn't cooked all the way.  I scooped the insides out and they're on a cookie sheet in the oven."

And so they were.  A big mound of dough, right in the middle of my oven, now utterly useless for making sandwiches.  And of course, there was the equally useless hollowed out bread shell on my counter top.

I tossed them both into the wastebasket and banned him from the kitchen.

I should have posted guards.

The next day, he bought some trail mix.  Now, I like trail mix.  In fact, my very favorite is a brand I've only ever seen at Aldi called Southern Grove.  I will only eat the Dark Chocolate Cranberry flavor.   But that isn't the kind Preacher Man bought.  He bought an ordinary, run of the mill peanut and M&M trail mix.  Which I can't stand.

All of this would have been okay, since he bought a small bag that was only for himself...but when I left him alone in the kitchen, he proceeded to mix the inferior trail mix with my heavenly Dark Chocolate Cranberry!  Not a small bowl of mine mixed with his, mind you, but all of mine with all of his!

I think I handled the situation very well.  I said, quite diplomatically, "WHY DO YOU KEEP RUINING ALL THE FOOD?!"


To which he replied, "I thought you weren't going to eat that.  I'll buy you another one."  And then he backed out of the kitchen.

 This time, I'm installing an alarm.




 

My Menu Making Adventure

I absolutely hate to cook.  It isn't that I can't; actually, I'm quite a good cook.  I just hate it.  But there are several people in my house who have somehow gotten it into their heads that I'm the person who provides the meals.  As if I'm the mom or something.

Oh...wait...I am the mom.

Okay, then!  Since people around here insist on eating, and hubby can't cook and the Free Spirit is on a special diet and therefore we have to avoid a lot of pre-packaged junk, I have to suck it up and cook.  Which brings us to the next step:  deciding what to cook.  I hate that too.  For a while, I subscribed to a menu service for $5 a month.  They sent me five meals a week, complete with recipes and shopping lists (awesome, since I also hate compiling those).  The only problem was that half the stuff my family wouldn't eat.  Plus I'm cheap and wanted to keep my five bucks.  So, my solution:  I gritted my teeth and created my own set of rotating menus.  I hated every minute of it.  But now they're done and I never have to do it again.

It was a tough and boring job, but somebody had to do it.  I used a really cool template from Busy Bee Lifestyle to plan these blasted menus.  I liked their template because it had separate meals for the kids.  Clearly the person who created that template understands kids.  Or at least my kids.  Of course, I like things with color, so I made a Publisher document and copied the style of their template and added illustrations.

Hopefully, my family won't get tired of the same 16 menus, because I have no intention of ever doing that again.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to print my shopping list.